A menu for the emmets
Tate St Ives is a pale 1980s block, with a fat rounded porte cochère and sea-stained walls. It is the…
High life
I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tank-like cars, home theatres on board, and fridge-shaped super…
Low life
Five and the Red One are a German covers band. It’s probably the most uninspiring name for a rock band…
Real life
‘This situation is Rorke’s Drift,’ said the builder boyfriend, after our proposed renovations were objected to at the parish council’s…
England’s new heroes were real Test Match specials
The weather forecast last Saturday promised 100 per cent likelihood of rain. I like that formulation: it doesn’t leave much…
Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has just published a report looking at the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds…
The turf
Khalid Abdullah, John Gosden and Frankie Dettori — owner, trainer and jockey — already figured among the great names of…
Diary
Diana Spencer has been dead for 20 years. I was a journalist on the Evening Standard in those days and…
Simone Young
She’s a local girl who made good — really good. Simone Young was born, educated and trained in Sydney. She…
Constitutional notes
When no means no The golden rule for constitutional change is that this should only be contemplated if it…
Classical conundrum
The great Mikhail Botvinnik excoriated chess played at fast time limits. Botvinnik believed that classical chess at time limits of,…
no. 468
Black to play. This is a position from Kramnik–Carlsen, Leuven Blitz 2017. How did the world champion win even more…
Mad about the boy
Tall, handsome boys with long legs and beautifully arched feet do not grow on trees (if only). Every ballet director…
An inconvenient truth
Maudie is a biopic of the folk artist Maud Lewis (1903–70) who is, apparently, beloved in Canada, and while Sally…
Portrait of the week
Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appeared to wrest control of plans for Brexit from cabinet rivals, while…
Beauty and the beasts
Doctors have analysed how the mucus of a certain type of slug gives it protection against its being levered off…
Parliament’s new tribe
Politics is such a fickle game that it’s perfectly acceptable to believe six impossible things before breakfast without ever having…
We need ideology in politics
‘Studying history at Balliol,’ writes Chris Patten, ‘I knew that the one thing which made me uneasy was a grand…
Fudging Ireland’s border issue can only mean Troubles ahead
The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict,…
His dark materials
Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…
The left can’t meme
Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s I remember a time when popular culture mocked the right wing stiff.…
Bureaucrats play God, break Caesar’s law
Education Department officials in Queensland have decided that primary school students can’t talk about Christianity or even give Christmas cards…
Happy holidays with the Byron Bay bed tax
While much of the nation confronts an incessant meth problem, our major political parties struggle with a different kind of…
